A couple months ago, I discovered the joy of LOLcats.  The buzz generated by the LOLcats brand of humor is a case study on the power of the internet.  The best way to attempt to explain it is that Lolcats is the internet version of an inside joke, a really really cute inside joke.  You just need to see it for yourself.  But I digress.

I have subscribed to 5 different mailing lists offered under the “I Can Has Cheezburger” brand, including “Engrish Funny,” “ROFLrazzi,” “FAIL Blog,” “Loldogs,” and “Lolcats.”  This means that every day, I recieve emails containing hilarious captioned pictures and links directing me to the website for more silliness.  The business model behind these emails is simple: Click the link, comment on the picture, and spend time on the main website … which enables the website to charge higher advertising fees justified through higher traffic.

In the interactive field, iPhone apps are a constant topic of discussion.  And, of course, we are supposed to be defining the potential applications of emerging technologies.  But at what point does “being on the edge of cool” stop justifying new ventures that don’t seem to contribute to the bottom line?  This is where Lolcats comes in.

My daily emails began promoting the “I Can Has Cheezburger” iPhone app.  As a consumer, I was all over that app.  As a business-minded individual, I found myself wondering how the app contributes to the revenue model.  In some cases, applications may send you to the website, encourage you to spend time/money elsewhere, or, of course, charge a fee.  The LOLcats application really does none of the above.  It simply provides entertainment to the users.  In this case, an iPhone app is actually counterproductive.  You see, as any logical person would do, I have unsubscribed from my daily Lolcats emails.  No more inbox flooding.  No more going to the website.  All that remains is one click - I pull up my iPhone app, and I’m instantly entertained.

I am a big believer in the value of brand equity - usually, when a consumer is spending more time with your brand, it’s a good thing.  But if they are spending more time with your brand, while driving less money to your brand…the math simply doesn’t add up.  I would pay for this iPhone app.  I might link to the website to comment.  But please don’t tell the Lolcats.  They’ll turn me into nomz

How often is too often to receive email marketing from a trusted company?  I get an average of 2-3 emails a week from Books-A-Million. I get nearly one a day from Performance Bicycle.  I am tempted to complain.  But I do, for the most part, like the emails;  I just can’t possibly read them all. 

Check it out: The Yellow lines are Performance emails, and the Pink are BAM emails over just the last 6 days.

And here is where I rant …

I am a part of both BAM and Performance Bicycle’s Member Programs, which I think are excellent - they offer great discounts and deals, exclusive offers and even money-back. 

For both of these companies I have been a member for over two years.  So for two years I’ve received literally HUNDREDS of emails and have opened way less than half of them.  In fact, I am getting increasingly annoyed by their messages because they are so often the same. 

There is almost never a NEW incentive for me to open the email message and thus build a relationship with their brand and ultimately purchase more of their product. I’ve learned over the years that it’s going to be “Bargain Prices” at BAM and a “$10 off coupon”, or a discount on Joe Muggs coffee beans.

Performace is perhaps a little less predictable, they’ll often annouce their sales and I’ve found some great deals.  They just come SO OFTEN that they stop feeling “special.” Can they really have a “Blowout Sale” every week?

WHAT COULD MAKE THIS BETTER?

I’ve had many conversations with people on this topic, including Shannon Delaney, Engauge Digital’s VP of Client Services.  The point she often makes is that so many companies collect information from their members (preferences, if you will).  But they do nothing with that information.  Both of these companies have the potential to make me more loyal (and to buy more of their product) by simply talking to me like an individual, not a group email list.

Let’s use Performance as an example.  They could collect information on how frequently I like to receive emails (once every two weeks is plenty), what my cycling interests are (road biking, mountain biking), and what I’m most interested in hearing about from them (special events, big sales, info/sales on products that fit my cycling needs).  They could then turn that information into action by delivering me only the content that is meaningful to me.

Sounds simple, right? Everyone’s doing this right? No (obviously not - and BAM and Performace are only two examples, I could go on and on). Shannon tells me it isn’t always that easy, especially when dealing with large companies.  Sometimes that data is spread over several systems.  Or, large companies have a hard time changing process to turn collected data into an actionable strategy.

Still, how long can I excuse BAM and Performance?  After years of email marketing - and at a time when social marketing is making targeted email messages even more important - it’s time to get smart about how to use this medium.

Shhh … don’t tell anyone, but there were folks here at Engauge that were watching the US Open playoff online, hanging on every stroke of play in arguably the most exciting major championship in golf - ever. This back-and-forth duel of Rocco Mediate (aka Every Man) vs. Tiger Woods (aka the Machine) was drama of epic proportions.

In the end, it was Tiger. He won in spite of doctors probably telling him his knee wasn’t ready, playing through his knee pain, using his driver as a walking stick.

And yet, the morning after this emotional, gut-wrenching victory, Nike sends out this email that, IMO, (whether intentional or not) seemed to ascribe Tiger’s victory to his Nike driver, ball and shoes.

To whoever was responsible for that copy: Too bad - you ’shanked’ that opportunity. A few reasons why I think this:

• Tiger’s driving was atrocious.
• Tiger’s Titleist putter helped keep him in contention.
• It was Tiger’s mental toughness and determination that shone through more than ever before.

Yes, he had his TW and swoosh gear on the whole time, but c’mon. The most you’d want to do is position yourself alongside Tiger as maybe an after-thought, a “btw” or “ps”. Am I over-reacting?

I shop at Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic (clearance items). 95% of my wardrobe is stamped with one of these three tags. Having said that, I had never shopped online for the clothing because it just never suited me for some reason - maybe because I hated the idea of paying for shipping. (The irony now is that shipping may cost less than the gasoline I’d use to get to a retail location!)

Recently, I tried ordering jeans recently at Gap online only to find that they were out of stock. Along with an apology, I got what they call an “Options Card” that can be used across all the brands. Then, I got an email announcing that they had free shipping and a single shopping cart for all four of their brands - Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic and Piperlime.

So I click through and find this clean, simple site navigation that gives me easy access across all of their online stores. I cruised through the Gap store and found nothing. Click the next tab and I was in Old Navy. Click the next tab and I was in Banana Republic. No mall cruising, no shopping bags. ONE shopping cart, ONE checkout with my Options Card and FREE shipping.

Long story short - I could handle this kind of shopping again in the future; it works for me and it’s convenient.

And for those of you too young to remember, the title of this post was a reference to an old Gap jingle that continues to reside in the recesses of my brain. If you remember it, now it’s stuck in your head, too. Talk about sticky branding.

I had the pleasure of speaking at the recent ACCM conference in Orlando on the topic of email marketing creative. No, I’m not a creative director, but I was particularly interested in this topic as I believe that email marketing as we know it is under attack and if we don’t make our emails more compelling, more relevant and in most cases more attractive, we’re going to continue to see results decline in this medium.

Email Insider had a nice article last week entitled, “Inbox Evolution May Force Facebook To Change Its Business Cards“. It’s a nice read but I can’t disagree more with the title. Facebook doesn’t have to change a thing. Marketers have to change in order to reach people today, as they have throughout time.

But I always think its great when we as email marketers (yep, we’re email marketers too, its still a very viable way to reach people — for now) put out studies like the one by ExactTarget mentioned in this article that says that 72% of respondents said they’d prefer to receive promotional messages via email instead of via social networks. Well, no kidding. I wonder why? Hm, could it be because you can unsubscribe or hit the “Mark as Spam” button in your email client when you get these promotional emails and you typically can’t in your social network?

Oh, I know, I just did a study in my mind. Turns out that 79% of people would rather get promotional marketing messages in magazines and newspapers rather than in email, where they might actually have to see it. Wait, more results just came in, 95% would rather get promotional marketing messages put right into their trash can at home rather than in their email inbox. So that’s what we should do, we should just create marketing messages and just throw them away immediately, that way the consumer gets what they really want, which is to be left alone.

Sometimes marketers get too far into the forest to see the trees and they/we lose sight of the fact that its not about kicking and screaming and fighting for the mediums that we are comfortable in to remain vibrant and worthwhile. It’s always been about finding relevant, non-intrusive ways to get a message in front of people in the hope that they may then, or later, take action on that message. And to do that, you have to be open minded, something that is foreign to most marketing people.

Amy Griswold and I just attended the sixth annual SilverPOP conference at Stone Mountain last week (05/13/2008). Like most vendor-customer conferences, I’m often somewhat skeptical about what I’m going to learn about email marketing in general. Most of the time, I attend these conferences to better understand new features that are being released, and to gauge their product road map so we can align the agency to take advantage of the tool in the future.

As we listened to the Keynote speaker, Terry Jones (Founder of Travelocity.com and chairman of Kayak.com), I was pleased to hear his insights on his management style and trends he see’s in marketing in general. What I wasn’t expecting was a very simple tactic he mentioned that I’d never really considered, but made a lot of sense.

Terry termed this “Snooze Alarm” for your email campaigns. Essentially, we all use some level of frequency control on campaigns, as well as behavioral triggers to determine when we market to customers via email.

In Terry’s case, a travel email campaign might be sent based on a monthly communications, seasonal events, etc. His “snooze alarm” tactic basically stated that if someone JUST bought from your brand (i.e. a flight ticket), then remove them from your normal marketing email communications, as the likelihood of them buying another flight ticket is extremely low. In other words, give them a break before marketing the same type of product.

Of course, it’s still OK to upsell the client on other products if it makes sense. But the general idea of this tactic is to reduce unneeded email communications. The net effect of this tactic should result in higher open rates and click-through-rates (CTR), and ultimately higher conversion rates. Additionally, you’ll also reduce media cost associated with an Email Service Provider (ESP), as your overall email volume will reduce.

It’s so simple, I can’t think of a good reason not to implement this tactic, apart from possible business intelligence issues coming from your CRM, ecommerce and ESP systems. But if you’re able to get the data and your systems to allow this level of list segmentation, then your golden!

This past weekend, I attended SoCon08, an unconference on social networking. During one of the breakout sessions, we outlined the various ways that we as consumers or businesses communicate with businesses. The complete list of communication mediums is below for review.

I found it interesting that as the group shouted out suggestions, it took 4 tries for us to mention email, which is an essential means of communication. I consider email essential because I can safely predict that one of the first things that you do each day in both your work and personal life is check your inbox for new email (well, maybe it’s actually the second thing that you do after sipping your coffee).

This exercise also signaled to me a major shift in way we think about email. Obviously, social networking is leading the charge in the way we think about traditional two-way conversations. But more importantly, I think that the internet continues to play a greater part of our everyday lives and social networking is an incredibly efficient means of communicating when we’re on the internet. In other words, we’re online so social networking allows us to have an online conversation whereas using email feels more like an offline conversation during an online experience.

So am I predicting that the death of email and email marketing?

We’re clearly provided with more opportunities these days to jump on the internet. For example, Starbucks allows you to jump online for free as you sip your latté. We’re also hooked on BlackBerry and iPhone devices to stay connected with colleagues and friends. That means that we’re at the crest of the email “wave”. So in my opinion, email is becoming less relevant as a communication means — instead it is becoming a means to set up to-do lists and archiving. However, I still believe that email will continue to serve a purpose in business communication and this means that the art of crafting, delivering and measuring the response from these emails will become even more important.

Communication Mediums:

• Website (Contact Us Forms)
• Newsletters (Digital and Print)
• Phone
• Email
• Blogs
• Face time
• Instant Messages
• SMS or Text Messages
• Nonverbal
• Networking events

The holidays are upon us and it looks like some folks are getting into the spirit of all things bright and twinkly by adding some of their own twinkle to their emails.

November 19 - AT&T recently sent me an email with a row of phones they were hawking as part of a holiday promotion. Low and behold, an animated .gif for all to see. Twinkle. Suddenly, visions of dancing cell phones in my head.

November 20 - Apple sends me an email announcing their ‘Black Friday’ sale event. For email clients like Outlook that don’t support animated .gifs, the email looked like this. However, in web mail clients like gmail, the animated .gif worked just fine and twinkled like this. (Santa - send me my iPhone)

November 23 - REI sends me this email that speaks to both skiers and snowboarders equally (because really, you’re either one or the other). Double twinkle.

So what does this mean? I’m not sure and would love some feedback on whether the animated .gif is a seasonal special like Starbucks Christmas Blend (my fave) or a new email trend.

If we’re honest about human nature, we gravitate towards ‘blingy’ and ‘blinky’ things, and my eye automatically went after the twinkly things in these emails.

I recently stumbled across this article on how to protect yourself against SPAM. Get this … a study conducted by a company called Nucleus Research revealed that the average cost of SPAM per employee per year is $1,934 - as a result of lost productivity*. While most of us may know what SPAM is by now, and how to defend ourselves from it (for the most part), some of us might not be familiar with its little brother, BACN. 

BACN is pronounced exactly like how you would say those greasy strips that clog up your arteries. This relatively new term, coined at PodCamp Pittsburgh, basically means emails that you actually want, but not right now. Some examples would be your subscribed-to newsletters and online bills. You can read about how it all got started here. Although BACN may not be as detrimental (or as annoying) as SPAM, it has the potential of robbing us of time spent on filtering our email - sorting the messages we really need from those we might never read.

Many of us battling SPAM have some extra help from anti-spam softwares or we use an ISP that provides SPAM protection. As for BACN, the solution may be as easy as thinking twice before signing up for anything online or offline. For example, do you really need that Facebook update when you are already checking your Facebook account for the fifth time today or the other various daily or weekly updates from your favorite stores (who’s websites you frequent anyway), when you are buried up to your neck with work?

So, with some help from SPAM protection software and a little common sense, we can all keep our inbox, and our bottom line, protected from the likes of SPAM and BACN.

Many user experience professionals shy away from marketing.  In many ways, who can blame them?  We’ve observed customers ignore banner ads, watched pop-up ads annoy and confuse customers, and read rants by usability pioneers about the evil that ads wield on web design.  We have seen attempts at applying a traditional “broadcast” model of marketing fail in interactive mediums.

But good marketing is more than ads—a whole lot more. Several concepts in marketing jive quite well with user experience.

Integrated Marketing Communications

Relationship Marketing

Customer Relationship Management

The Good: The Communication Experience Is the Marketing
By emphasizing consistency, customization, and credibility, these concepts echo a few characteristics of what I’ve described as customer-centered communication.  

These concepts additionally

• Lead us to view a customer’s interaction with a brand holistically instead of isolated in certain channels.
• Challenge us to effectively apply customer data such as demographics and buying history to improve communications.
• Encourage us to think about building long-term relationships with customers.

The Potentially Bad: User Experience Opportunities
The potentially bad side of these concepts is, of course, their execution. (Remember those banner ads.)  Here are a few ways user experience professionals can help avoid the bad.

Don’t Interrupt Me: Placement and Content 
Because user experience professionals understand how and why customers actually use the channels, we know when and where marketing communication is most appropriate.  We also can inform its content.

Example: A well-placed, relevant, and undisruptive BP banner ad on CNN.com that engaged even a skeptic like me. It shares a similar topic with the article, visually stands out on the simple page, and expands instead of taking the user away from the page.

Don’t Just Tell Me—Show Me
Telling is reporting that you hiked 25 miles on the Appalachian Trail last weekend.  Showing is describing the weather, the scenery, the sounds, the animals you encountered, the soreness in your muscles.  Telling makes you aware of what happened. Showing engages you in the experience. I think showing is critical to making brand attributes clear and to developing trusting, long-term relationships with customers.  User experience professionals can help brands “show” in interactive mediums.

Example: Betty Crocker has been demonstrating brand attributes such as practical, friendly cooking expertise since the 1920s through recipes, cooking tips, cooking shows, promotions for discounted cookware, and more. (Below is a 1951 print ad with tips and a recipe.) These efforts continue successfully today on the Betty Crocker website and its RSS feeds.

Help Me Help Myself: Applying Customer Data
User experience professionals can make the most of customer data across customer self-service channels and applications such as store kiosks, web applications, automated phone systems, and more. We know how to leverage that data to make self-service customized and therefore more valuable and easier to use. 

Quiet the Noise: Optimizing for Specific Channels
Of course, we can make marketing communications highly usable and accessible in specific channels.